CFML, Clojure, Software Design, Frameworks and more...

My cf.Objective() Schedule 2013

May 3, 2013 ·

I saw that Nolan Erck had blogged his cf.Objective() schedule so I thought I'd do the same. The decisions are not generally as hard for me as for Nolan: when I'm not speaking or attending a general session, I'm going to be focused on JavaScript since that's where I'm weak and that's where I'll learn the most. Mostly focused on JavaScript, that is.

May 16, 2013

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Architecture & Design in Software - Keynote (Dan Callahan) - Looking forward to Dan's keynote! It's really nice to not have a sponsor opening the conference with a thinly disguised marketing spiel - kudos to the committee on making this change!

10:10 AM - 11:10 AM: Architecture & Design in Software - Learn You a What for Great Good? Polyglot Lessons to Improve Your CFML! (Sean
Corfield) - I don't have much choice. If I wasn't speaking, I'd go to Jonathan Rowney's talk on AngularJS (hey, if I can persuade everyone in my session to go to that, I can skip my talk and attend as well!)

1:25 PM - 2:25 PM: Architecture & Design in Software - General Sesson (TBD) - Adobe's General Session. Might as well listen to their marketing spiel just in case they've finally decided to do something interesting. Sorry, but I haven't been an Adobe customer for ages. I have no Adobe software installed and I'm happy about that. I'd dearly like to see the ColdFusion team do something to really move the language forward but given their stated focus on "the enterprise", I'm very skeptical these days.

4:55 PM - 5:55 PM: js.Objective() - HTML Templating with Mustache.js (Matt Gifford) - I've played with a number of templating solutions on the server so I'm interested to see what's available on the client. Besides, the Monkeh is always entertaining!

I'll probably skip the Lightning Talks. I generally find those a bit self-indulgent. One of the things I really liked about the lightning talks at PyCon and Clojure/West earlier this year was that they were technical and covered interesting little projects - related to the core technology of the conference - that were worth 5-10 minutes of air time.

May 17, 2013

11:20 AM - 12:20 PM: Architecture & Design in Software - How Groovy and Grails made me a better ColdFusion Developer (Scott Stroz) - Scott is always entertaining and the JS choice is "Design MVC Mobile Apps Visually in Hours" and I don't like any of these visual design programs, never have. I want to know about the mechanics and the architecture.

1:25 PM - 2:25 PM: Architecture & Design in Software - General Sesson (TBD) - Railo's General Session. I wonder what they've been up to since forming The Railo Company last year? I was a "booth babe" for them last year because they needed a warm body while they were off giving talks or attending talks (I did not attend a single session last year) and my involvement with the company naturally ended after the restructuring and the "rebirth" of Railo, backed by five large CF partners (one in the US, four in Europe). I'm using Railo 4 for my talks, because I need closure support, but otherwise haven't really been following their fortunes since I'm happy with Railo 3.3 at work and we're only just starting to consider upgrading.

2:35 PM - 3:35 PM: Architecture & Design in Software - Who let a bum into the kitchen? Using Vagrant and Chef to create development environments. (Nathan Mische) - I'm starting to work with Pallet, which is Clojure's "devops" toolset so I'm curious about other options. The JS option would be Ben Farrell's Sweating to the Web which I'm sure will be a lot of fun but I'm not very interested in the Kinect or any sort of game-related technology.

3:45 PM - 4:45 PM: Integration & Tools - Humongous MongoDB (Sean Corfield) - Me again, for the last time! My JS choice would be Jeff Tapper's JavaScript Enterprise Workflows which is probably where I'd go if I wasn't speaking but seriously? Using "Enterprise" and "JavaScript" in the same sentence?

Birds of a Feather. Five choices, up to two hours each (or longer!). I signed up to host "TDD, CI, and other miracles of modern software engineering" where I'd like to find out why you're not already doing these things - what is stopping you? How can I help you you change that sad situation? In turn, you can come along and learn what all these acronyms mean and why they're so popular in many modern technology communities like... well, most everything except CFML (oh, alright, and PHP!).

May 18, 2013

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: js.Objective() - Grow a Backbone.js and drag your apps out of the past with JavaScript Templating (Brad Wood) - Again, very interested in templating on the client and various other JS frameworks, since I know so little about them.

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: No idea. There's an unlisted "sponsor" slot in the JS track but I think it'll be non-JS content (based on the list of Gold sponsors and who's already on the schedule). So I might go to Gert's talk about Railo 4?

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: js.Objective() - Data-Driven Documents: Data Visualization Using D3.js (Tony Garcia) - I've seen a couple of presentations about D3 in the Clojure / ClojureScript community and it looks amazing so I'm really happy Tony swapped his session to a time I can attend!

1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Process, Performance & Security - Waterfall to Agile: Improve your Project Workflow Without Drowning (Brad Wood) - That is a really, REALLY, REALLY hard choice! All the sessions have something I'm interested in and Elliott's "Improbable" JS talk will probably be mind-blowing, as his talks tend to be. Adam's REST API talk sounds interesting (we're doing a bunch of REST stuff at work), Tim's Git Workflows should be full of branchy goodness, Gert's Performance Tuning talks are always fascinating... But as a strong advocate of Agile Methods, I'm very interested to hear what Brad has to say about transitioning from old-school "waterfall" development to more modern methods, so it just has the edge for me.

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Mobile & Front-End - Responsive Apps using Bootstrap 2.0 (Dan Vega) - OK, this is also a tough choice. We're using Bootstrap at work so I want to learn more about it (I'm not working on the UI code so I haven't had a chance to look at it yet), but I'm also very interested in Ryan's talk on AMD and RequireJS for managing larger scale JS development. However, if I were truly going large scale on the UI, I would favor ClojureScript (which compiles to JS) and that already has a strong modularity story so Dan's Bootstrap talk has the edge.